My favourite story of the 'Big Freeze' is the one about the 60 guests who got snowed in over the New Year at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain's highest pub, in the Yorkshire Dales.
Everyone pitched in peeling potatoes, cleaning lavatories and holding up the bar, while Tracy Daly, the landlady, rescued motorists from drifts. And the funny thing was that the guests appeared very reluctant to be rescued when the roads were opened three days later.
This is a balmy start to what otherwise will be a piece of non-cheery writing. Last week the cold winter finally caught up with us, but we got none of the warm spirit of cosiness that the chill tends to bring with it.
The other day, a man stalled his car and came pounding menacingly on my car window because I couldn't reverse back into a main road and make way for His Bulliness. I was too distracted by his ugly contorted face to comprehend his angry monologue (like an idiot, I reversed and squeezed myself onto the main road).
Then some days later my sister had an egg thrown and spluttered on her windscreen as she was driving by Marsa Road (terrible stench - we were driving and gagging for the rest of the week). Bizarre behaviour to say the least. A shrink would have a field day here. I blame it fair and square on the manically stressful lives we're leading, which is turning us into a bunch of angry humourless gits (hence the road rage), and which is making us all go cuckoo (hence the egg throwing).
We're blowing the lid more often because we live in a society that is constantly pressuring us to be on the go. Even during our supposedly free time.
Take weekends. We are constantly expected to be 'interesting'. Unless you go back to work on Monday morning telling all about your wild, boozy, trapeze stint followed by lunch on a terrace with an infinity pool, you are considered a saddo, with no life.
Well, if it's of any consolation to anyone, my winter weekends are always a quiet affair. I do the housework (no one talks about this - we like to pretend it's done by elves), read the papers, do some errands and generally loaf around. Yes, I do occasionally go out for a nightcap, but to be honest, when it's so cold I absolutely do bugger all.
Why, the highlight of last weekend was watching, and laughing out loud all the way through Lion King 2. Go ahead, say how lame. But I daresay, my weekends are quite the norm out there - it's just that the majority won't admit to it.
With all these pressures on performance, it's very easy to become less cheery. The economic climate is not helping. Take, for example, the news that sick leave is rising in private sector. Of course it would. Have you worked in a private workplace lately? It's all doom and gloom, and waiting for the axe to cull the necks in the immediate future.
The trick, according to the wise Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, is to ignore the future and the past, and enjoy washing the dishes.
"If while we are washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way then we are not enjoying the moment... and chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either," he says. Put simply, we'd all be much happier if we just lived moment by moment.
Well. Who would have thought? Of course, this ain't easy. I tried it the other morning but kept drifting off to imagining how the said dishes would look (smashed) on the head of that window-pounding man. See, I'm a product of a stressed society.
Perhaps as a nation we need to be provided with free anger management classes, which would include courses entitled 'The art of patience', 'Let's tone it down', 'How not to jab fingers in the chest to make a point', 'How not to be so damn serious about everything' and 'Give us a smile'. But I think that our only lifeline is the weather. We need snow: with snow top-of-the-wellies deep, and stalactites hanging off the gutters like something out of a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm.
Ideally, we'd all get snowed in, in a pub. Three days of whisky drinking, jolly chatting and merriment is perhaps the best de-stresser we could ever need. Wouldn't that be grand?
krischetcuti@gmail.com